The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may or may not constitute prior art.
In engineering, redundancy is the inclusion of extra components or functions to a system that are not strictly necessary for normal operation but rather for the benefit of increasing reliability, usually in the form of a backup or fail-safe.
In the interest of maintaining increased system reliability provided by redundancy, it is important to have a method to detect if duplicate components or functions included in a system have faded or are operating at a state that is susceptible to a latent failure event such that replacement will be required soon.
A conventional latent failure detection method places two systems with duplicate components in parallel. Basically, when the same inputs are simultaneously provided to the duplicate systems, the same results are expected to be provided at the outputs simultaneously, or within some time tolerance window, unless a true failure or latent failure is present in one of the systems.
From the foregoing, it is apparent that approaches to detect latent failures in redundant systems but aspects of the disclosed exemplary embodiments seek to provide improved approaches.